Meet the 19-Year-Old With a 10-Year Plan to Clean Half the Pacific Ocean

Boyan Slat is the president and founder of the Ocean Cleanup and creator of a technology he says can clean half the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in a decade. He first presented his idea at a TEDx talk in the Netherlands two years ago, and is now preparing to attend the "Our Ocean" conference hosted by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

Slat said he thought of his plastic-capturing concept years ago while diving in Greece and seeing more plastic bottles than fish. Since then, he has developed a website that includes all of the technology's specs, a feasibility study and a campaign to fund it. He says his team has embarked on three gyre expeditions within six months. He shot this video with I Am Eco Warrior to explain his mission and how he hopes to accomplish it with floating barriers.

Slat's idea hasn't been received well by all, but he chose to take his critics head-on in a recent response blog post. It serves as a complement to the 530-page report on feasibility and further explains the idea shouldn't be written off as a kid's idea.

"The oceans are the most important life-support systems of our planet," Slat said. "It regulates the climate, it produces oxygen. The vast majority of biodiversity can be found in the ocean."

As the world's population grows and the planet warms, demand for water will rise but the quality and reliability of the supply is expected to deteriorate, the United Nations said Monday in this year's World Water Development Report.

"We need new solutions in managing water resources so as to meet emerging challenges to water security caused by population growth and climate change," said Audrey Azoulay, director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in a statement. "If we do nothing, some five billion people will be living in areas with poor access to water by 2050."

Despite a court-ordered injunction barring anyone from coming within 5 meters (approximately 16.4 feet) of two of its BC construction sites, opponents of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion sent a clear message Saturday that they would not back down.

Twenty-eight demonstrators were arrested March 17 after blocking the front gate to Kinder Morgan's tank farm in Burnaby, BC for four hours, according to a press release put out by Protect the Inlet, the group leading the protest.

Climate change is a big, ugly, unwieldy problem, and it's getting worse by the day. Emissions are rising. Ice is melting, and virtually no one is taking the carbon crisis as seriously as the issue demands. Countries need to radically overhaul their energy systems in just a few short decades, replacing coal, oil and gas with clean energy. Even if countries overcome the political obstacles necessary to meet that aim, they can expect heat waves, drought and storms unseen in the history of human civilization and enough flooding to submerge Miami Beach.

Trump has loudly declared his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement, but, behind the tweets and the headlines, U.S. officials and scientists have carried on working with international partners to fight climate change, Reuters reported Wednesday.

A Hollywood scriptwriter couldn't make this up. One day after new data revealed widespread toxic water contamination near coal ash disposal sites, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt announced a proposal to repeal the very 2015 EPA safeguards that had required this data to be tracked and released in the first place. Clean water is a basic human right that should never be treated as collateral damage on a corporate balance sheet, but that is exactly what is happening.